I recently participated in the Breaking Things Hackathon hosted by Hashnode and sponsored by Bug0, and it turned out to be a genuinely fun and refreshing experience.
What made this hackathon special for me was how closely it aligned with my day‑to‑day work. As a Senior SDET, I use Playwright extensively with a traditional Page Object Model (POM) approach—defining locators, managing workflows, handling inheritance, and constantly maintaining selectors as the UI evolves. While powerful, this style often means spending more time on framework maintenance than on actual testing.
During the hackathon, I explored Playwright with Passmark, and the difference was immediately noticeable.
I didn’t have to worry about finding each element, writing XPath selectors, or structuring complex POM classes. Instead, I could focus on user flows and test intent. The tests were easy to read—even for someone without a strong coding background—and extremely quick to create. In a short time, I wrote close to 30 regression tests that were fast, stable, and surprisingly resilient thanks to self‑healing capabilities.
Another highlight was how effortless cross‑browser testing felt. With minimal setup, I could execute tests across browsers without additional configuration or boilerplate.
This hackathon challenged a few long‑held assumptions for me:
Automation doesn’t need to be complex to be effective
Tests don’t have to be hard to read to be reliable
AI can genuinely boost tester productivity, not complicate it
You can find the project I worked on here:
https://github.com/Hema-Nambi/passmark-project
A big thank you to Hashnode for hosting and Bug0 for sponsoring such a great event. Hackathons like this encourage learning by doing and make space for testers to explore modern, AI‑driven approaches to quality engineering.
Read the full post on Hashnode: https://hemaai.hashnode.dev/breaking-things-and-building-better-tests-my-hackathon-experience?
